


Art Class

by katrinawritesthings



Category: SHINee
Genre: Fluff, NB, Nonbinary, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-19
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-10-22 01:09:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10686675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katrinawritesthings/pseuds/katrinawritesthings
Summary: u know when u meet up with ur cute datefriend for your date after their job at the rec center but they have to take a surprise second shift and u wind up accidentally taking an art class while u waitAfter a lot of introduction and pep talk and more bullshit about how brave it was for him to choose to be healthy and how he’s going to overcome the barriers keeping him from just deciding be happy, Taemin has come to the conclusion that this woman has never been anything but extremely neurotypical for her entire life. He also gets his assignment: on one side of the canvas, paint himself as he is and feels now, and on the other side, paint himself with his dream life.tumblralso tw for some depression related ableism





	Art Class

"Hey, um. You sure you’re gonna be okay waiting for me?” This is the fourth time Jonghyun has asked that question. A tiny smile quirks up the corner of Taemin’s lips as he nods. It disappears a few seconds later, but he still feels the slight amusement Jonghyun’s worry is giving him. **  
**

“Yeah,” he says. He plays with the hem of Jonghyun’s shirt, staring at his fingers instead of expending the energy to look into their eyes. “I wouldn’t have said yes the first time if I didn’t mean it.” He’s not a lying kind of person. It usually takes people at least half a year to actually start believing that. By that time frame, he thinks Jonghyun should in around a few more weeks. Jonghyun hums, but it’s more of an unsure hum than a reassured one. Taemin fits his hand fully on Jonghyun’s hip to tug them a tiny bit closer.

“I know I seem upset,” he mumbles, “but I’m just. Having a really low emotion day.” He shrugs. He gets those sometimes. “And, not low like, negative,” he adds when Jonghyun makes a worried little noise. “I mean, like. I’m not. _Feeling_ the whole… feelings thing. Like everything is muffled, you know?” His whole life is low emotion, but some days he just rides through on ninety-seven percent apathy.

“Mmmh… no,” Jonghyun says slowly. “But. Okay.” They gently cup Taemin’s face and guide him into a quick kiss. Taemin presses back, and then presses again for a second one before he lets Jonghyun go. “I’m sorry, again,” Jonghyun says. “I know this was supposed to be our date but Key’s dog--”

“Got sick and they had to go take care of it and they begged you to cover their class, I know,” Taemin says. Jonghyun told him. Twice. “I’ll be fine. And we can still walk around the lake after.” He pushes Jonghyun gently towards the door of the music room. It’s almost time for the next kids’ rhythm class and Jonghyun’s surprise second shift. Jonghyun pouts and squeezes his hand tight once more before they slip through the door. Taemin watches it close behind them with a slow sigh. He looks around the lobby of the rec center, looks out of the windows at the sunshiney lake, looks at the little bench in the corner of the room.

He makes his way there, pulling out his phone to check his apps. He really doesn’t mind. Jonghyun is a good person and can’t say no to a friend in need. They’re kind of lucky Taemin isn’t feeling anything today, to be honest, because there were tiny little tickles of annoyance and disappointment in the back of Taemin’s mind during that conversation that he knows would have actually pissed him off if he was. Now he just… doesn’t care. Good ol’ depression, rolling him through his troubles and avoiding arguments. What a pal.

He rests his head against the wall as he scrolls through his phone. Every now and again he glances up, but it’s not until he notices that a considerably large group of people has gathered around him that he blinks and actually lowers his phone. What the fuck. He frowns, sitting up straight and looking around. This is fifteen people, at least, all standing around him. Or, well, no; not him. The door next to him. That makes more sense. He stands up as casually as he can and squints at the little flyers on the door that list what’s happening today. With a glance back at his phone for the time, he thinks he’s found the right one.

“Find your inner joy through painting,” it reads. “Heal your mental health with each stroke of the brush. Revitalize and rejuvenate your soul through self-reflection on the canvas. Free, limited seats, first-come, first-serve.” Taemin snorts as he reaches the end. There’s a little doodle of someone holding a warm fuzzy heart at the bottom. Sounds like a load of bullshit.

But, still. He always did like the way paint smelled. And it’s free. He glances around at the group of people and kind of just melts himself into them, pulling out his phone again and blending in until it starts.

When the door opens and they all file in, Taemin takes a seat near the back and yawns into his hand. This set up is pretty decent; a cheap canvas, acrylic and watercolor paints, and a little pencil with a dry, hard eraser. The lady that greets them is less than decent. Five words out of her mouth and Taemin is already grimacing. No one should ever be talking this loud and smiling this hard and radiating off so much pep. She needs to chill it down several notches. Her name is Janet, and Taemin can’t possibly think of a more fitting suburban white mom name for her. And he tries for five minutes.

After a lot of introduction and pep talk and more bullshit about how brave it was for him to choose to be healthy and how he’s going to overcome the barriers keeping him from just deciding be happy, Taemin has come to the conclusion that this woman has never been anything but extremely neurotypical for her entire life. He also gets his assignment: on one side of the canvas, paint himself as he is and feels now, and on the other side, paint himself with his dream life. Taemin looks blankly at his canvas. Seems simple enough. He takes it and turns it sideways so it’s more landscape than portrait, picks up a brush, and starts painting.

Twenty minutes later, he thinks his two selves are looking pretty good. The anatomy’s a little off, but he doesn’t think that's supposed to matter towards the healing of his inner soul. He’s adding a little more yellow to his dream self when Janet comes by to check on him.

“Hey,” he hums before she can repeat the same “And how are we doing over here?” thing he’s heard her say to every other person in the room. “How’s this?” he asks, gesturing. He looks blandly up at her for a second as she scans his work, then looks back at it himself.

On the left, his default state now: tired, kind of slouchy, thinking about sleep, with Jonghyun leaning in and pressing a kiss to his cheek. And on the right, his dream self: tired, kind of slouchy, thinking about sleep, a McDonald’s bag in his hand, real organic kitty ears on his head, and Jonghyun leaning in and pressing a kiss to his cheek. Taemin is happy with it.

“Hmm,” Janet says. Taemin lifts his brows tiredly. That was the fakest “hmm” he’s ever heard in his life. “Are you sure you understood the prompt?” she asks gently. Taemin blinks.

“Yeah,” he says. He points at the canvas. “That’s me now. And this is the me I want to be. That’s me if I was content with my life.” It’s pretty straightforward, really. Food and cat ears. The ultimate dream. She still hums at his work in that fake way and points between both Jonghyuns.

“Who’s this?” she asks.

“My girlfriend,” Taemin half lies with a shrug. He doesn’t feel like coming out to this woman and he’s sure Jonghyun’s polygender ass won’t mind that he said “girlfriend” instead of “datefriend” for once, given the circumstances. He thinks he remembers one time Jonghyun telling him they didn’t mind what terms or pronouns he used anyway. And his anatomy is trash enough for it to go unquestioned.

“Oh, that’s sweet,” Janet smiles at him. “Why don’t you add something to her?”

“I--change my girlfriend?” Taemin asks, confused. “I thought this was about dream me.”

“It’s about your dream _life,”_ she tells him. “You have to have something that you want to change about her. I mean, women, right?” She laughs behind her hand like she didn’t just literally insult herself with that shitty stereotype. Taemin sure is glad that he’s riding through this day with negative three emotions because he does not have the energy to get upset about that.

“I mean,” he frowns. “No? She’s pretty great.” He wouldn’t be dating Jonghyun if he didn’t like them. Janet tsks and shakes her head, smiling this smile like she thinks Taemin is lying and he actually hates the person he willingly chose to be with.

“Okay, well,” she says, and pats his shoulder. Taemin doesn’t remember giving her permission to touch him. “I’m sure you’ll have thought of something by the time I get back to you.” She leaves with a bright smile and Taemin blinks after her. Well alright then. That was a weirder than usual daily reminder that straight people are fucking wild. Looking back to his painting, he sighs. There’s nothing to change about Jonghyun. Like, yeah, Taemin is personally offended by how they hate plums and the way they sing while folding laundry is fucking obnoxious, but his dream life doesn’t involve stripping his datefriend of their personal choices. He puts his chin in his hand and sighs again. He should change _something_ at least so he has an improvement to show.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s hissing and trying to rub pink paint off of his thumb when Janet comes to check on him again.

“Oh!” she exclaims, looking from the pink on his hand to the pink on his canvas with a smile. “See? I knew there was something you wanted to change about her.” Taemin rubs at the paint on his hand for another moment to hide his little scowl for the few seconds it takes his face to get tired of holding it.

“Uh, yeah,” he says then. “She’s always wanted pink hair, so. I gave it to her.” He adds another little pink highlight over the original silver with his brush. It’s super cute. Then he turns the brush around and pokes the little puppy by Jonghyun’s foot. “And she loves dogs, so, one of those,” he hums, “and I thought it would be nicer if we could pay to both have our own meals to eat together, so.” He pokes the little McDonald’s bag he added in Jonghyun’s hand. A quality improvement, if you ask him. Now his dream self doesn’t have to share his nuggets.

“Hmm,” Janet says, and taps her finger on her lips. She has this look like she’s trying to figure out how to say something rude without it sounding rude. Taemin rinses pink off of his brush and prepares himself for it. “I think,” she says slowly. “You’re still not. Like. See, these are things that make _her_ happy,” she says. “Not you.”

“I mean… yeah,” Taemin says. He’s confused again. “Her being happy makes me happy.” He thought that was like, a core part of being in any kind of positive relationship with someone. Wanting them to be happy and liking it when they are. “And I don’t want her to be, like, a puppet that just agrees with everything I say,” he says. For the first time today he’s disappointed that he’s not feeling expressive. He could have put a large amount of passive-aggressive snark in there if he was up to it. He thinks Janet may have picked up on it anyway by the way her smile twitches.

“Okay, well,” she says. “It’s just that, you don’t _look_ happy in your second portrait.” She points at dream Taemin’s less than ecstatic face.

_“Oh,_ oh,” Taemin says. Oh. Okay. He gets it. She’s the smile police. “I’m not, like, sad or anything in this,” he explains. “Just tired.” He is very much capable of being happy and tired at the same time. He was nailing that aesthetic earlier before he showed up for the date that isn’t happening, and he’s sure he’ll be nailing it later when Jonghyun finishes their class. He’s just not the most expressive dude. “I’m always tired,” he clarifies further when Janet doesn’t look understanding. “It’s a depression thing for me.”

_“Ahhhh,_ ” Janet says, and Taemin immediately knows that he fucked up. He should have just said “oh yeah” and drew a little smile on his face and she would have left. Now he has to deal with whatever revelation she thinks she’s had. “Okay, see. What I want you to do is draw yourself _without_ the depression.”

Taemin looks at her for a long, silent moment.

“What?” he asks.

“Your dream self,” she says. “You should draw him _happy._ Without the depression. The you that you want to be.”

“I don’t….” Taemin starts, taking in her peppy expression with a mix of offense and disgust muffled under his apathy. “I don’t want to not have depression,” he says flatly.

This time, it’s her turn to stare blankly at him.

“What?” she says, and Taemin sighs shortly. This is so much more effort than he wanted to go through today.

“My depression is a part of me,” he says. “It’s been part of my identity for twenty-three years. I didn’t spend my whole life learning and living and understanding it to wind up just wanting it _gone_.” It’s influenced the way he thinks, the way he experiences the world, where he falls on the axes of intersectionality and oppression and his understanding of all of that. He wouldn’t know how to live and function without it.

“If I drew myself without it then it wouldn’t be me,” he says, poking his little paint self gently. It would be an entirely different person. She looks like she’s going to interrupt him, probably with some bubbly bullshit about how it would be the real him finally shining through; he interrupts her first. “Becoming neurotypical isn’t my dream,” he says clearly. He’s not giving up his depression. Not that, not his anxiety, not his OCD, not the undiagnosed cocktail of everything else that shapes who he is.

_“This_ is my dream,” he says, pointing at the portrait he drew. “ _Me,_ with someone I love, financially secure, with my brain the way it is.” He finishes his little explanation and looks up at Janet, even more tired than before. He wonders if this class has gone on for so long that Jonghyun has finished with theirs. He hopes not. He would hate for Jonghyun to think he just up and left. He reaches for his phone in his pocket to check his texts, then realizes that he was kind of in the middle of a conversation. Whoops. He goes back to staring at Janet as she stares at him. After several more long moments, she takes a breath.

“Well--”

_“Oh,”_ Taemin exclaims suddenly. He sits up straight and looks for his brush. “Oh--sorry, I just remembered something,” he tells her. He really didn’t mean to cut her off that time. He dries his brush, dips it in black, and squidges a tiny little star onto the canvas at the corner of dream Taemin’s left eye. “I want a tattoo,” he says, adding tiny dots at the end of each point and then little squiggles after each dot. He puts his brush down again when he’s done. There. Perfect. He looks back up at Janet expectantly; for once, her smile is more of an unsettled line.

“Okay, well,” she says slowly. She shakes her head quickly and that bright smile is back on her features. “We have these painting classes every Thursday, and other mental health workshops throughout the week,” she says. “You should come by to really work on this little slump you’re in right now. It could be fun.” She smiles wider and even giggles a little before turning and leaving him for the next painter. Taemin stares after her, impressed.

“Wow,” he breathes, and turns back to start fixing up little details of his painting. What an addition to his list of “NT people are fucking wild” today. He thinks she just deleted everything he said from her memory. Well, good. He doesn’t want to be around this woman anymore anyway, even in her imagination. He adds a flower bracelet to his dream self and gives dream Jonghyun a new little thumb ring to replace the one they lost last week.

After a few minutes he remembers that he was supposed to check his texts; putting his brush down, he digs in his pocket for his phone. His neko atsume cats have empty food bowls when the app loads, which is entirely unacceptable. He remedies that immediately and then paints a little Lexy on his sweater. Nice. Best cat.

Once he puts his brush back down, he remembers again that he was supposed to be checking his texts.

“Fuck,” he hisses, and fucks up the lock pattern twice trying to quickly open it again. This time he actually taps his messages; there isn’t a text, but when he brings up his conversation with Jonghyun, the little typing bubble is up. Oh. Nice timing. He waits for the message to show up (“Where are you??”) before he quickly types out his own (“i entered a painting class?? it kind of just happened sorry but i think its almost done”). He gets a thumbs up emoji from Jonghyun next and feels the tiniest ping of fondness. They’re so cute. He bets they’re gonna love the painting, too.

When the class finally does end, Taemin listens blandly to Janet’s pep and enthusiasm about how they’ve all become happier, more self-aware people through visualization and hands-on reflection. He snorts when she mentions leaving a donation in the box by the door on the way out, but he does anyway, a few dollars for the supplies he used. His painting is still kind of wet so it’s awkward to carry it out. Everyone else seems to be having the same problem and Jonghyun looks very amused when Taemin spots them watching them all leaving from a bench next to the music room.

“Hey,” he hums, slouching up to them. He lets Jonghyun pull him into a more secluded area around the corner before accepting their little cheek kiss. “How was the class?” he asks. Jonghyun shrugs.

“Tiring,” they say, “but only because I’m not used to doing two. The kids were great.”

“I’m glad,” Taemin tells him. It’s good that Jonghyun isn’t feeling too gross. Jonghyun smiles up at him and gently pokes his canvas.

“What about yours?” they ask curiously. Taemin hums and holds it up.

“We had to draw ourselves now and then our dream selves,” he says, pointing between the two sides. “So I drew us and then us again, but, like, with more stuff.”

“You gave me pink hair,” Jonghyun squeaks, hands coming up to squish their cheeks. They look up at Taemin with adoring eyes before back at the painting. “And a new ring, and--the puppy! Oh my gosh.” Their cheeks are pink with delight and Taemin feels his chest buzz with pride. He knew Jonghyun would love this. “Your kitty ears are super adorable too,” Jonghyun says, brushing their finger just gently enough over the paint to not smear it.

“Thanks,” Taemin says. He leans forward so he can look at it upside-down. “I really like it,” he says. “She wanted me to draw myself like, not depressed, but--”

“Oh, was it _Janet?_ ” Jonghyun asks, lip curling in distaste. Taemin looks at them, mildly amused.

“Okay, so, it’s not just me that didn’t like her?” he asks. Jonghyun shakes their head quickly.

“I can’t _stand_ her,” they groan. “It’s so bad having the kids come from her smiley bullshit about how they should strive to be NT and then have to reassure them that they’re not useless garbage just because they can’t. Like, I’m a music teacher, not a fucking life coach,” they scowl.

“Ew,” Taemin says. Doing it to adults is one thing, but teaching that shit to kids is even more fucked up.

“Yeah,” Jonghyun sighs. They run their fingers through their hair with a shake of their head. “Anyway,” they says. “Date time?” They reach for Taemin’s fingers on the edge of his canvas with a hopeful little smile. Taemin gives them the smallest smile back for a second and leans in for a tiny kiss.

“Date time,” he agrees. Maybe they’ll only walk around half of the lake instead of the full course because they’re both extra tired, but it’ll still be fun and good. Jonghyun bounces a little and starts tugging him further down the hallway.

“I’m pretty sure your art will fit in my locker,” they say. “So we can come back and get it when it’s dry.”

“Okay,” Taemin says. He lets Jonghyun take the canvas from him, then steps forward to link their arms together. As he follows Jonghyun to the employee rooms, he thinks about the flowers around the lake. He can make himself a bracelet on their walk. And after, they can grab some food on the way home. That’s two dream goals down already. Pleasure rumbles quietly inside of him as he rubs his thumb over the soft skin of Jonghyun’s forearm. For a low-emotion day interrupted by disappointment and ableism, he’s feeling pretty good.

**Author's Note:**

> [look at this uwu](http://anaisarts.tumblr.com/post/149181580463/after-a-lot-of-introduction-and-pep-talk-and-more)


End file.
